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This Week in Plasma: New Weather Widget and On-Screen Keyboard

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This Week in Plasma: New Weather Widget and On-Screen Keyboard

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week we released Plasma 6.8, but we didn’t stop there: work on Plasma 6.9 has been coming in hot and heavy, and there’s a lot to talk about! So let’s jump right in:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.9

The Weather Report widget has received massive changes: a new layout that includes per-hour temperature and precipitation forecasts, and support for weather forecasts from Open-Meteo. (Bohdan Onofriichuk and tusooa the west wind, kdeplasma-addons MR #1037, KDE Bugzilla #451767)

Weather Report widget showing forecast for Michigan Beach with a graph of temperature and precipitation changes across the day, provided by Open-Meteo

Plasmas’s on-screen keyboard has been extensively re-worked, and now includes multiple desirable features: the option for a full-size keyboard including arrow and modifier keys; a flick keyboard for Japanese; and distinct layouts not tied to system locales. (Devin Lin, plasma-keyboard MR #109)

On-screen keyboard with modifier and arrow keys

The Night Light feature now lets you temporarily enable or disable it for a specific period of time, independent of its normal schedule. (Vlad Zahorodnii, kwin work item #321)

Unfortunately the color temperature changes aren’t shown in this video, but trust me: something is actually visibly happening on a physical screen!

If you’d prefer your System Tray icons to be really small, you can now configure them that way. (Jin Liu, plasma-workspace MR #6978)

System Tray with very small icons in a two-column grid, as well as the System Tray’s config dialog showing where to configure the icons to be this small

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.8.1

Plasma now shows an OSD when you use the keyboard to increase the brightness when it’s already at its maximum level, just like it already does when when you do try to increase the volume when that is at its maximum level. (Pavel Radzivilovsky, KDE Bugzilla #505558)

Plasma 6.9

Clipboard-related keyboard shortcuts shown in System Settings are now grouped into their own section, rather than in the generic “Plasma Workspace” section. And the feature to basically rotate the entire clipboard history up or down (such that a new item becomes the top one, and you can easily paste it) now uses that terminology to make it easier to figure out how the feature works. (Taras Oleksyn and Tomáš Hnyk, plasma-workspace MR #7208, KDE Bugzilla #467252)

System Settings’ Keyboard Shortcuts page showing a highlighted item in the sidebar named “Clipboard”, introducing the right pane full of clipboard-related shortcuts

Plasma no longer shows a notification about a new screen being connected if it’s a virtual output. But if it’s a real physical screen, the notification now shows more information about that screen. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace MR #7233, plasma-workspace MR #7195)

Removing a network on System Settings’ Wi-Fi & Networking page no longer hides the right pane until you select a new network in the sidebar. (Taras Oleksyn, KDE Bugzilla #511362)

On operating systems that configure Discover to use both PackageKit and “offline upgrades”, the page that includes details of every package being updated now also tells you the current package versions, not just the new ones. (Taras Oleksyn, KDE Bugzilla #500663)

Qt 6.13.0

Qt now renders fonts with hinting when using a scale factor over 100%. (Infinality, Qt Bug #128874)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.7

Fixed a bug that made Plasma’s built-in RDP server crash when the client uses a very large pointer. (Curious J Tuber, kpipewire MR #285)

Plasma no longer fails to launch on a system with a broken MIME type database. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace MR #7214)

Fixed a bug that made section headers go missing on System Settings’ Bluetooth page when using a language other than English. (Kai Uwe Broulik, bluedevil MR #270)

You can now disable the “running out of disk space” notification, if you’d like. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace MR #7202)

Plasma 6.7.6

Fixed a bug that made Plasma’s built-in RDP system unstable when using the Microsoft RDP client on Android. (Yury MonZon, KDE Bugzilla #520260)

Fixed a bug that prevented the feature to save your current settings as a new Global Theme from successfully saving whether or not the panel should float. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #526843)

Plasma 6.8.1

Fixed a bug in the Task Manager widget that would occasionally make Plasma crash. (David Edmundson, plasma-workspace MR #7149)

Plasma’s built-in RDP system is now more reliable when receiving connections from the Microsoft RDP client on Windows. (Mauricio de Lima, krdp MR #251)

Fixed a few cases in the Audio Volume widget and its System Settings page where tooltips showed un-escaped HTML or ate ampersands. (Tobias Fella, plasma-pa MR #433)

Fixed a bug that made the Kup backup system’s background daemon auto-start when it wasn’t actually being used. (Iyán Méndez Veiga, kup MR #68)

Plasma 6.9

KRunner-powered search fields once again find power-related items like “Shut Down” and “Restart” without you having to type out the entire text. (Ramil Nurmanov, KDE Bugzilla #522158)

On System Settings’ Region & Language page, languages can now be dragged up and down in their list view without functional and visual glitches. (Vsevolod Stopchanskyi, plasma-workspace #7189)

Task Manager tooltips for Flatpak apps now always show media and volume controls when needed. (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Bugzilla #518840)

Frameworks 6.32

Fixed a bug in the Breeze icon theme that resulted in GTK apps that respect the icon theme displaying certain Breeze icons at the wrong size. (Alexey Varfolomeev, KDE Bugzilla #493975)

Qt 6.12.1

Fixed a bug in Qt that could occasionally keep Plasma from quitting properly during logout when any panels had a visible Pager widget on them. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #525727)

WirePlumber 0.5.19

Bluetooth devices renamed in the audio settings now correctly use their new name throughout the UI. (Julian Bouzas, wireplumber issue #1043)

How you can help

KDE has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we need your support to keep KDE sustainable.

Would you like to help put together this weekly report? Introduce yourself in the Matrix room and join the team!

Beyond that, you can help KDE by directly getting involved in any other projects. Donating time is actually more impactful than donating money. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to be a programmer, either; many other opportunities exist.

You can also help out by making a donation! This helps cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors, and in general just keeps KDE bringing Free Software to the world.

To get a new Plasma feature or a bug fix mentioned here

Push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.

- The KDE Team

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